Since my last post was on making a basic Béchamel sauce, I might as well share a simple recipe which you can use your "practice sauce" on. As you get more used to it, you can also make variations to the recipe by changing the vegetables, like carrots or thin-sliced potatoes (and you're getting closer to Gratin Dauphinois).

In the early days of cooking for The Husband, here are some of first things I learned:

1. Ground pepper does not go down well with the Then-Boyfriend. He choked right before my eyes. Not once, not twice, but till the very last strand of fettucine on his plate. It must be love.

2. The Then-Boyfriend's mother is a highly experienced cook, being a home economics teacher in her entire career. While most of us measure precisely when baking, my Maman eyeballs 100 grams of flour. You don't see her working in the kitchen often. But all our meals are complete 3-course ones.

3. Today's entry - Béchamel Sauce.

Put simply, this Mother of All French Sauces consists of butter, flour and milk. Depending on what it is used for, its consistency can be adjusted by tweaking the proportion of the three components.

In our kitchen, we use it for gratin, lasagne, croque monsieur, puff pastry tart - these are just off my fingertips. I've been putting off writing about it because I have not found a foolproof proportion for it.

briefly

JL and S grew up in France and Malaysia respectively. They met while living in Singapore, stayed a year in the USA (Cambridge, MA) then the south of France, Malaysia, and are back again in the USA (New York, NY).

frenchinos at home is where we share some of our stories with friends, much like the living room, dine-in kitchen, or the timber-deck balcony which we've always wanted to have, which sounds most impossible where we live now.